Robert Ryan - Take Cover, Watson!

ROBERT RYAN is an author, journalist and
screenwriter. He was born in Liverpool and moved to London to study natural
sciences at university. He began his writing career in the late 1980s for The
Face, Arena and the US edition of GQ, before moving to a staffjob in the
Sunday Times. In 1999, after the publication of his first novel, Underdogs, he
left to go freelance, although he is still a frequent contributor to the
newspaper. He has published a total of fourteen novels under his own name, the
latest being The Sign of Fear, and two (Steel Rain and Copper Kiss) as Tom
Neale. The latter have been optioned by Fremantle TV with a view to creating a
TV series. Ryan is currently working on his nextnovel and a variety of
television projects. Find out more at www.robtryan.com

Never let it be said that it is a
waste of time for an author to meet his or her public. Without an audience
suggestion at a library talk I was giving, my new Dr Watson novel (the fourth
in the series) would be a very different beast. At the event, I announced that
it was to be called The Two Headed League, and would feature Dr John
Watson in WW1 working with a celebrity partner - not Sherlock Holmes - to solve
a series of killings at country houses across England.

A hand shot up. “Why,” the gentleman
asked, “when London is such a vital character in the original Conan Doyle
stories, don’t you set at least one of the novels in that city?”

It slightly took the wind from my
sails. He was right. The first in the series, Dead Man’s Land, mainly
takes place in the trenches of Flanders. The second, The Dead Can Wait,
in Norfolk and Essex, and the most recent (A Study in Murder) in a POW
camp for British officers, after Watson is captured by the Germans.

I realised that in my efforts to
avoid pastiche-ing Conan Doyle, I had ignored a key element of the original
stories - the capital, or as ACD had it: “London, that great cesspool into
which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.”

The Two Headed League went
on the back burner. The sequence of novels had taken me – or rather Dr Watson –
up to 1917. What, I wondered, was happening on the Home Front in that year?
Well, as it turned out a great deal, including the Blitz.

But, I hear you ask, didn’t the
Blitz take place in 1940? Well, yes, the famous one. But in 1917, after the
Zeppelins had proved too vulnerable to incendiary shells, the Germans began to
send over fixed wing Gotha bombers. There were many similarity between the
bombing campaigns of 1917/18 and 40/41 – Londoners took to the tube stations
for shelter, there was loss of life – most famously at the Upper North Street
School in the East End, where eighteen died, the majority aged 4-6 – and a
system of early warnings/all clear was developed. The latter were crude -
a policeman on a bicycle with a placard saying “Take Cover” and blowing his
whistle warned of enemy aircraft (motor cars were also co-opted where
available), while Boy Scouts blowing bugles indicated that the danger had
passed.

A fixed wing Gotha bomber

Throughout the summer of 1917 and
into September, whenever the moon was full and the bombers of the “English
Squadron” could navigate by the silvery arrow of the Thames, right into the
heart of London, the sound of the Gotha’s engines pulsed across the city, often
causing panic in the populace. The South Coast suffered, too, with Hastings,
Dover and Margate enduring multiple raids, and again the mere sound of the
approaching Mercedes and Maybach engines struck terror into those on the
ground. The phenomenon became known as “The Gotha Hum” (even if the planes were
sometimes the enormous Zeppelin-Staaken Riesenflugzeuge, or Giants) and the
seeds of my new novel, The Sign of Fear, grew from that. What if someone
could create a bogus “hum” to clear the streets of London, as a cover for
perpetrating an ambitious and terrible crime?

There are other elements in there –
the first cases of the Spanish flu, the frailty of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Ernest
Shackleton’s rogue brother, the torpedoing of hospital ships by the Germans,
the disgraceful treatment by the government of those maimed and blinded in the
trenches. But at its heart are Major John Watson and a very unlikely new
partner, both trying to thwart the nefarious schemes masked by the phony Gotha
Hum. Actually, come to think of it, it could still have been called The Two
Headed League after all. Still, I’d like to thank the unknown audience
member who nudged me towards London as the scene of this particular crime.